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An emergent property is one that stems from factors lower down in the evolutionary process that do not involve the emergent property. The emergent properties emerge from amid a set of properties none of which herald the emergent one. It just springs forth, life from non-life, consciousness from non-conscious, por soir from en soir.

...[E]mergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.) Each of the quoted terms is slippery in its own right, and their specifications yield the varied notions of emergence that we discuss below. There has been renewed interest in emergence within discussions of the behavior of complex systems and debates over the reconcilability of mental causation, intentionality, or consciousness with physicalism.[1]According to O'connor and Wang emergent properties can't be red…

If T. S. Eliot were writing about Ehrman's The Triumph of Christianity, he would probably say it this way:

This is the way the book endsThis is the way the book endsThis is the way the book endsNot with a bang but a thud.

No, Ehrman never really explained "WHY" Christianity triumphed, beyond pedantic obvious-isms like, "People told other people about it, and they believed it." The closest he ever came to giving a "WHY" was when he suggested miracles might have something to do with it. And although he stayed non-committal about whether there were any real miracles happening, he cut off any attempt to make that a distinguishing factor by admitting that people of that time worshiped gods because of the benefits they provided [140]. He also admits that other gods were believed to have superhuman powers to provide things. What that means in the end is that either a) they were all just as able to do miracles, thus cutting off any reason to believe Christiani…

On March 30, 2016 I posted, on this blog,[1] "Quantum Particles Do not Prove a universe from Nothing." The post was backed by sources such as Scientific American, David Albert, Even Hawking's Center for Theoretical Cosmology[2]Even so there are atheists telling me it's wrong. I dispute this, Rather than being wrong I think is couches it's terms in the parlance of an old theory. Because it doesn't explain things in the jargon of the newly accepted theory skeptics have an appropriate juncture at which they can charge it with being wrong because it appears out moded.

The major issue is that virtual particles (VPs) do not really emerge from nothing uncased at lest there's no proof that they do. This issue revolves around the emergence of VPs from true actual nothing, that is the lack of any thing at all. I will bracket discussion for this paper of why the scenario of origin must begin with this state of true nothing[3]

I took last week off so that I could meet Mrs H for lunch and allow her to listen to Billy Graham's funeral on the radio. She was a great admirer of Graham, and she was grateful for the chance to listen in.

Now, what of Ehrman's latest? I made my way up through page 139, and Ehrman has yet to drop any kind of footwear that would disturb universal harmony. He acknowledges how intolerant the Romans were of religious movements they considered deviant [89] and that Christianity was exclusivist [125]. He also admits that Christians were "widely considered strange." [104] Chapter 4 has the promising title, "Reasons for Christian Success" [105] and it begins with an admission that Christian growth rates were "absolutely extraordinary." However, Ehrman initially takes some time to putter around with the point that Christian monolatry at least would not have been considered extraordinary [115]. I don't think the contrary is argued by anyone whose leadin…

In his paper "Must the Beginning of The Universe Have a Personal Cause?"[1]Wes Morriston quotes William Lane Craig making the augment that a personal origin is the only way to have an eternal cause with a temporal effect.[2] The rationale for that is merely an assertion that with an eternal cause working mechanically the effect would be eternal too,:If the cause were simply a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions existing from eternity, then why would not the effect also exist from eternity? For example, if the cause of water's being frozen is the temperature's being below zero degrees, then if the temperature were below zero degrees from eternity, then any water present would be frozen from eternity. The only way to have an eternal cause but a temporal effect would seem to be if the cause is a personal agent who freely chooses to,create an effect in time.[3]Craig is using this argument to argue for the personal nature of God, If God was j…

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